The Book of Samuel: Essays on Poetry and Imagination - Tapa blanda

"We could say of Mark Rudman what he says of D. H. Lawrence: 'He isn't so much part of the present as he is part of the instantaneous.' Urgent, quicksilver, unpredictable, Rudman's essays pay homage to his masters Lawrence, Williams, Lowry, and move, as they move, in swoops, feints, and lunges toward revelation." --Rosanna Warren "Trenchant, passionate, deeply knowledgeable, and often funny, The Book of Samuel gives us literature not as cultural artifact but as lived experience. Mark Rudman's prose has an urgency and acumen thta one finds in only the very best essays." --Siri Hustvedt "[A] powerful and idiosyncratic collection of essays... It will affect the critical discourse of poetry in a way that may seem slow at first but will continue and endure. This is not the sort of book that gets published every year or even every decade. "--Luc Sante, author of The Factory of Facts

Crisis, breakdown, rejuvenation: this is the territory of poetry into which Rudman takes readers with this set of essays. Constructed as a series of character studies, the essays are rooted in autobiographical material with biographical counterpoints, tying the poets distinctly to places. Even as they are placed, however, they are displaced: Rudman's subjects, from D. H. Lawrence to Czeslaw Milosz to T. S. Eliot, are almost all exiles, either geographically or within themselves.This exile spins anger into energy, transmuting emotion into imagination the same way that Passaic Falls, known to William Carlos Williams, turns water into power. The mosaic style of the essays touches on nerve after nerve, avoiding the snags of academic jargon to ease toward an illuminating truth about the artists' shifting work and worlds. Some of the Samuels - Beckett and Fuller - were able to navigate these shifts, while others - Coleridge and Johnson - are shown to be less able to transmute their energy into motion.